“Taking Women Students Seriously”

"Women and men do not receive an equal education because outside of the classroom women are not perceived as sovereign beings but as prey…. the capacity to think independently, to take intellectual risks, to assert ourselves mentally is inseparable from our physical way of being in the world, our feelings of personal integrity. If it is dangerous for me to walk home late of an evening from the library because I am a woman and I can be raped then, how self possessed, how exuberant can I feel as I sit and work at the library? How much of my working energy is drained by by the subliminal knowledge that as a woman, I test my physical right to exist every time I go out alone."

—	Adrienne Rich, feminist writer. It is from a chapter called, “Taking Women Students Seriously” from her book called, On Lies, Secrets and Silence.

Interesting things

“There is no evidence that we’ve been placed on this planet to be especially happy or especially normal. And in fact our unhappiness and our strangeness, our anxieties and compulsions, those least fashionable aspects of our personalities, are quite often what lead us to do rather interesting things.”

Jon Ronson

I know that girl

We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it...

"We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world. The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you, have not been shaped by a paterfamilias or a schoolmaster, they have sprung from very different beginnings, having been influenced by evil or commonplace that prevailed round them. They represent a struggle and a victory."

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  Marcel Proust

This is just another Love letter to Paris

I have a thing for Paris and with Paris and it is going to last a lifetime. I know this because what she and I have is Love. My sister and I spent the best of the summer days there. That city is a thing of beauty and I fall in Love at every avenue. It is breathtaking and sometimes even that expression is not good enough.

Hemingway was right "If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast”

The 'N' Word

Learn how to say “no”.
Cram that word inside your mouth,
the whole thing, make sure all of it
gets in there. Let it walk on your tongue.
Practice with it in the mirror, push it
out, make faces, learn to love the salt
and bitter of it. Teach it to perch on your lip,
buzz, collect pollen from your sugary gloss.
Make it swarm between your cheeks. 

 Jeanann Verlee, ‘Swarm’

People, help the people.

The young and the talented 

Birdy_People help the People